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The American Prospect - articles by authorenBiographia Literaria: Just a Storyhttp://prospect.org/article/biographia-literaria-just-story
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">S</span>ometime in the early 1980s, when I was still a graduate student in English at UC-Berkeley, I received an invitation from a member of my dissertation committee. He and his wife were having a dinner party for a visiting writer, a much-lionized British novelist who was spending a week or two on the Berkeley campus as a Regents' Lecturer. Was I familiar with the novels, and would I like to come to dinner?</p>
<p>Yes, indeed, to both questions. And could I, I asked, please bring my -- well, whatever word we were using in those days for the man you lived with but hadn't yet married. (I think the current phrase was some acronym derived from census-taking jargon, but I couldn't swear to it. All I know is that we were past "boyfriend," past "significant other," but not yet into "partner.") There was a slight hesitation at the other end of the phone line -- Did they lack adequate seating? Did they fear that a sociologist wouldn't know how to converse with literary types? What, exactly, was that pause about? -- and then the second invitation was duly issued.</p>
<p>In the event, it was my husband-to-be, Richard, who made the greatest social hit. The minute he clapped eyes on the writer's husband, who entered the living room of that fastidious Julia Morgan house wearing one green sock and one red sock, he knew he had found a friend. They were seated next to each other at dinner, as it happened, and while I engaged the Lion in serious literary discussion down at our end of the table, they exchanged jokes and stories and generally amused one another. At the end of the evening, I was informed that the two men had already made a plan for the coming weekend: The four of us were to take a little trip together down the coast to Big Sur.</p>
<p>That's how Richard and I came to spend two nights in Carmel with Iris Murdoch and John Bayley. (As I said to Richard at the time, "How funny. The last time we were in Carmel I brought an Iris Murdoch novel, and this time I brought Iris Murdoch.") I have many terrific memories of this trip, all still as clear to me as if they were preserved on film. There is Iris swimming in the Pacific Ocean at Point Sur, where only a maniac would brave the freezing water, the surf-carved rocks, and the threatening undertow. There is John chatting in the courtyard of our Carmel motel with some of our fellow guests, a husband and wife from the Central Valley who repeatedly describe themselves as "educators." ("Oh," said John afterward, with his usual twinkle, "I thought they kept saying they were <i>hedge cutters.</i>") There are Richard and John exchanging amused glances as Iris talks earnestly with Emil White, the self-appointed curator of the Henry Miller Museum, while he desperately attempts to flirt with her. There is Iris stalled in front of one of Carmel's tourist-trap art galleries, pausing to admire, with great seriousness and attention, a particularly grotesque glitter-flecked seascape. And there, above all, is the half-hour in the living room of our tacky little motel suite when the four of us watch a <i>Star Trek</i> rerun together. John and Iris, who have rarely if ever seen TV, remain riveted to the screen during the whole of the classically sentimental episode. At the end, when the disguised alien is killed while trying to help the starship's crew and reverts, in death, to his own true shape, the two of them turn to each other with tears in their eyes and dismay written across their faces. "It's just a story, it's just a story," they murmur reassuringly.</p>
<p>We saw them only two other times. The first was a couple of years later, on a quick trip to England, when we took the train out to Oxford to have lunch with them. John picked us up at the train station and drove us out to the seventeenth-century broken-down castle, or whatever it was, in which they had lived for many years. I vaguely remember vast unheated rooms, moth-eaten tapestries on the walls, and huge stacks of books piled here and there on the unswept floors. I recall more clearly the derelict quality of the kitchen from which the food emerged under John's ministrations, and also John's enormous pride in the secondhand pea coat he was wearing; he had bought it at an army-surplus shop for something like three pounds. We had a delightful lunch (it was mainly out of tins and packages) and then a pleasant walk to the local churchyard, where Iris was particularly taken with the little dog that curled at the feet of its dead mistress on one of the funerary monuments.</p>
<p>Our final visit was in the summer of 1995, when the three of us (Richard and I by now had a 10-year-old son) journeyed out to Oxford from London. By this time John and Iris had moved into Oxford itself, having abandoned the seventeenth-century wreck for a normal house, but they still drove to the station to meet us. While John waited in the car outside, Iris came in to get us. Her hair was every which way and her slip showed beneath the hem of her skirt, but this was not unusual and I thought nothing of it. (The first time I ever saw her speak in public, she had a long piece of masking tape trailing from her skirt that remained distractingly attached to her during the entire lecture; Iris was never one to pay much attention to appearances.) Still, as we walked around Oxford and looked at the colleges together, I began to notice an alarming vagueness in her conversation. When I asked her, for instance, if she had a new novel coming out, she said yes; but when I asked her its title, she said, "I can't remember." </p>
<p>This tendency became even more pronounced when John left us to attend a college meeting and Iris remained alone with us during lunch at a rather grand local hotel. She could converse about the food itself and about the room in which we sat, but beyond that -- in that capacious mind, which once held everything from ancient Greek philosophy to nineteenth-century Russian novels, which had room for every visual image, from Titian's <i>Flaying of Marsyas</i> to the trashiest Carmel seascape, and in which she used to compose her novels fully, scene by scene, before setting the first word down on paper -- there remained only a series of blanks. Like John, who was still resolutely pretending that nothing was wrong, I felt unable to come to grips with what had happened. "Alzheimer's," said my husband sadly as we sat on the train going back to London. But the word seemed inadequate to my sense of despair.</p>
<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he strange thing about the movie <i>Iris</i> is that a surprising number of its reviewers, particularly but not exclusively in England, have had similar stories to tell. Iris Murdoch knew an inordinate number of people, and it is very odd indeed for all of us to see her played by Judi Dench -- so much so that this substitution of an actor for a friend (this transformation, if you will, into an alien after death) has come to seem a part of what the movie is about.</p>
<p>In the stills advertising the movie, Judi Dench looks astonishingly, terrifyingly like Iris. But in fact her portrayal did not remind me of Iris at all. Granted, only about five minutes of screen time are devoted to the Iris Murdoch I first knew: the strong, generous, confident novelist who has made her mark on the world. The rest of the performance -- and Dench does her usual magnificent job, there is no quibbling with that -- is devoted to an Iris in decline, an Iris who is ceasing moment by moment to be herself.</p>
<p>There is one particularly wrenching scene in which John has taken Iris to a clinic to be examined for Alzheimer's and they are speaking to the examining doctor. "It's implacable," the doctor says of the disease. </p>
<p>"But it won't win in the end," says John, hopefully, agitatedly. </p>
<p>"It <i>will</i> win," says the doctor.</p>
<p>"Thank you. It's very kind of you," says Iris, and she means it, because honesty matters more to her at this point than anything. What makes the scene so touching is that even as her memory and speech are going, Iris retains this essential quality, her passion for the truth.</p>
<p>An innocent viewer can be swept away by such moments, as I was swept away by similar moments in <i>A Beautiful Mind.</i> But then I had never met the Nashes, nor had I read Sylvia Nasar's book, so I could enjoy (if that is the right word) the movie on its own Hollywoodish terms. <i>Iris</i> is significantly less Hollywoodish than <i>A Beautiful Mind</i>; it is at once more tactful and more unsparing, like the doctor's kind because they are truthful words. (It certainly has a better director -- the marvelous stage director Richard Eyre -- and a cast that can't be improved upon.) Yet it left me cold, and I think this is only partly because I knew the real Iris and the real John. </p>
<p><i>Iris</i> has been structured as a series of parallel scenes between the lost past -- that golden Oxford period when John Bayley and Iris Murdoch first met -- and the debased present, in which Iris goes progressively downhill. Kate Winslet plays the young Iris, and she is actually very good. In some ways, although she is of course far too pretty, she is closer to the Iris Murdoch I knew than is Judi Dench. Winslet has captured something of Murdoch's deep-voiced seriousness, her placid conviction, her powerful sense of her own powers. Unfortunately, because of the way the movie is arranged, we associate these qualities almost entirely with the young Iris, and so they seem to have disappeared long before the Alzheimer's set in. What <i>Iris</i> ends up being is therefore an elegy to lost youth -- a reasonable subject for a movie, I suppose, but not at all what this one should have been about. For what Iris Murdoch and John Bayley presented, even in late middle age, was a portrait of a loving and deeply satisfying marriage. That condition is briefly gestured toward in the movie <i>Iris</i>, but it is never made as real as either the excitements of the early courtship or the horrors of the later decline.</p>
<p>A large part of the problem lies in the way John Bayley has been portrayed. Both Hugh Bonneville (as the younger John) and Jim Broadbent (as the older one) have chosen to play him as a bumbling, unattractive, stuttering, somewhat inarticulate fellow, a bit of a fool sometimes, and certainly the petitioner in relation to Iris's much-desired, much-petitioned queen. It is true that John Bayley stutters, but the rest of this is nonsense. When I knew him, he was sharp as a tack and very funny, much funnier and sharper than Iris herself. She had a huge, heavy intelligence that tended to squash things as it came down on them; his was much more like a knife, or a scalpel, or a sewing needle, or some other implement that is useful for detail work. I have read the word "besotted" in reviews praising Jim Broadbent's performance, and indeed his face, in some of the scenes where Dench is speaking, deserves the adjective. But John Bayley was never besotted with Iris, at least not by the time he had reached the Jim Broadbent stage of his life. He knew her for what she was -- not fully, perhaps, but well enough to love knowledgeably. And even at the Hugh Bonneville stage, he was not unaware of a certain near-ridiculousness about her: That, indeed, was part of the appeal.</p>
<p>Iris's potential to appear ridiculous, which was perhaps a function of her pure obliviousness to appearing anything at all, is crucially missing from the movie. Instead, we are offered a once-dignified woman who is suddenly reduced to the mindless condition of a <i>Teletubbies</i> watcher. But to the Iris Murdoch who wrote the novels, that element of ridiculousness was essential. She needed to rush in where angels feared to tread in order to capture the human emotions she was after. The novels are never cautious or discreet or merely intelligent; they are great flaming bundles of feeling, not unlike the fireworks display that appears in one of the earliest books. Jealousy and sexual passion and a frequently misapplied desire to manipulate the passions of others are central to the story lines. Characters go vastly astray and are only rescued by the most ludicrously unlikely plot turns -- when indeed they are rescued, which is not always. I would not put Iris Murdoch's novels into the Orwellian category of "good bad books," but nor would I confidently claim for them the status of enduring literary masterpieces. At their best they satisfy deeply, but it is in much the way the best Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s satisfied: through a strange combination of intense sensation and coolly distanced perspective. It is the clash between the distance and the sensation that makes them so interesting as novels.</p>
<p>John Bayley is a writer of a wholly other sort. He never verges on ridiculousness, except on purpose, which is an entirely different thing. Bayley is completely in control of his rhetoric, and his sensibility is a coherent one. He makes us feel his emotions through his intelligence, and vice versa. His whole personality, but particularly his wit, shines through in his writing. This is why he is so much better as a memoirist and essayist than as a novelist; we need to feel him talking to us to get the full thrust of what he is saying. His best books, I think, are <i>The Characters of Love</i> (a literary critical work about how people love, and why we love them as characters, in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Henry James) and <i>Elegy to Iris,</i> which was written after Iris developed Alzheimer's but before she died -- and which became the basis for the movie <i>Iris.</i></p>
<p>In deriving the movie from John Bayley's book, Eyre and his collaborators made a fatal rhetorical error: They took the narrator's self-presentation at face value. John does, it is true, sometimes portray himself as a bumbling, inexperienced, befuddled young man, and he does construct a fairy tale about this youthful self and the powerfully mysterious Iris. But the way he tells the story is very self-consciously <i>as</i> a fairy tale, and clearly not the kind that has a happy ending. Also, he intercuts the befuddlement with lines of such sharp observation that they almost take your breath away.</p>
<blockquote><p>I was heartened by her general appearance, and its total absence of anything that for me in those days constituted sex appeal. There was nothing so conventional as that about this woman. She was not "a girl," and she had no girlish attractions. That made the fact that I was in love with her much more exciting. . . .</p></blockquote>
<p>One cannot imagine the Hugh Bonneville character in <i>Iris</i> thinking anything at all like that about the Kate Winslet character. The movie has simply got it wrong.</p>
<p>Why does this matter so much? Because, by losing the character of John Bayley, the film loses the essence of the love story. <i>Elegy for Iris</i> is not about a great and powerful woman who lost her mind and was loyally cared for by the good but inferior man who loved her. If John Bayley at times makes it seem that way, it is because he is being gallant: He, who still possesses the language in which to tell their story, is consciously diminishing the degree of power he wields in relation to his now-mute wife. We can tell he is being gallant because the language itself reveals his strengths. His sentences show us that John was a man capable of seeing Iris for who she was, the potentially ridiculous mixed with the utterly admirable; and they imply that she, in turn, was capable of loving him for the incisiveness and self-consciousness she lacked. It is this mutuality -- not equality, exactly, but something much more necessary to love -- that made their married happiness so tremendously appealing. And it is this mutuality that disappeared when Iris's mind went. The movie, by tipping the balance of power in Iris's favor, does her a deep disservice, and it does us an injury, too, by depriving this real-life fairy tale of the delicate tragic balance John worked so hard to preserve.</p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 16 Apr 2002 21:22:16 +0000142563 at http://prospect.orgWendy LesserInsufficient Evidencehttp://prospect.org/article/insufficient-evidence
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">I</span> don't understand why everybody is making such a fuss<br />
over <i>In the Bedroom</i>, Todd Field's first feature-length movie. The film has a few<br />
surprisingly good moments, but these are vastly outweighed by its creakinesses,<br />
its unlikelihoods, and its forced, false emotions. It deals with a subject--the<br />
murder of a beloved only child--that is almost destined to fail if it does not<br />
rise uncannily above itself, and given this choice, <i>In the Bedroom</i> opts<br />
repeatedly for failure. That it should do so is comprehensible and perhaps even<br />
honorable (as ambitious failures are often honorable), but it does not make for a<br />
coherent, aesthetically satisfying, emotionally rewarding artistic experience.</p>
<p>
<i>In the Bedroom</i> is actually three movies bundled into one, and like its<br />
youthful hero, each of the three gets cut off in its prime. First there is the<br />
Maine-local-color movie, a portrait of the seaside town of Camden, with<br />
undertones of harshness and potential violence shimmering through the wealth of<br />
natural beauty. This segment introduces us to Frank Fowler, a handsome, engaging,<br />
promising young architecture student appealingly played by Nick Stahl; his<br />
parents, a doctor (Tom Wilkinson) and a music teacher (Sissy Spacek); his<br />
girlfriend, Natalie (Marisa Tomei), a slightly older woman with two young boys<br />
from a former marriage; and her ex-husband, a threatening nogoodnik who happens<br />
to be the scion of the town's wealthiest family, owners of the local fishery. It<br />
also introduces us to a range of supporting characters and to the town of Camden<br />
itself.</p>
<p>
But already one senses something false here. If you've ever seen Frederick<br />
Wiseman's terrific documentary Belfast, Maine, you'll recognize that Field's<br />
version of a small Maine town is a sanitized, Hollywoodized portrayal, focusing<br />
almost completely on the generically American upper-middle-class types and<br />
ignoring the very people who give such towns their rich, strange, and sometimes<br />
frightening local character. The film's verisimilitude is not helped by the fact<br />
that virtually none of the actors have mastered the distinctive regional accents<br />
of Maine. Marisa Tomei is especially badly miscast: She sounds, indeed, like a<br />
local girl, but her locale is audibly Brooklyn, and when she tries to do<br />
something approaching a down-east inflection, it comes out instead as Chico<br />
Marx. ("I love-a you," she tells Frank in one of their early scenes together.) I<br />
also thought it odd that her ex-husband, who is supposed to come from a very rich<br />
family, spoke with the lowest regional accent--but then, class is one of the<br />
subjects on which <i>In the Bedroom</i> seems distinctly unclear.</p>
<p>
Sex is another. Repeatedly, the movie tells us that the female of the species<br />
is bad news. During a fishing episode that provides the movie's title, wise old<br />
Dr. Fowler tells one of Natalie's young sons that the lady lobster is the one to<br />
watch out for, since what happens "<i>In the Bedroom</i>" is likely to cost the<br />
competing males a limb or two, at the very least. This little nugget sets us up<br />
for movie number two, the one that begins when Thuggish Ex-Husband shoots Lovable<br />
Young Frank through the eye. (I must admit that at this point, with the loss of<br />
the only character I cared anything about, my interest in the film diminished<br />
severely. If it had been a better movie--if it had been even half as good, for<br />
instance, as Pedro Almodóvar's <i>All About My Mother</i>--my attachment to the<br />
dead boy could have worked in the film's favor. But it never had any hopes of<br />
being that good.)</p>
<p>
The middle section of <i>In the Bedroom</i> has been widely praised as an astute,<br />
sensitive, moving portrait of parental grief. No description could be more<br />
inaccurate. Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek are not just unconvincing in the roles<br />
of bereaved parents; they are pretty much incomprehensible. Especially in the<br />
case of Spacek (whose youthful gutsiness has hardened into a kind of taut, dry<br />
absence of warmth), I couldn't figure out whether we were supposed to be watching<br />
Mary Tyler Moore in <i>Ordinary People</i> or the grieving mother in <i>All About My<br />
Mother</i>--whether the mother, that is, was supposed to be a monster or a<br />
sympathetic victim. The movie itself can't figure this out, and the director<br />
isn't giving his actors any hints. Is Mrs. Fowler just another lady lobster,<br />
responsible for her son's flight to an equally dangerous other woman? (This is<br />
the accusation her husband levels in a moment of subsequently retracted rage.) Or<br />
is she a martyr to a small-town culture which takes everything she cares about<br />
away from her--even, eventually, her capacity to grieve for her son? Both<br />
possibilities are suggested, but neither is enacted to any persuasive degree.</p>
<p>
In the end, we are simply transferred over to movie number three: a revenge<br />
drama in thriller mode, complete with nighttime killing, disposal of body, and<br />
close call near a police station. But nothing comes of this plot at all--it ends<br />
in midstream, just like the other two, before we can even begin to imagine<br />
whether Frank's parents will ultimately have to pay for the vigilante murder of<br />
their son's killer. It's barely credible that two mildmannered people could be<br />
driven crazy enough by grief to engage in this sort of plotted-out revenge. But<br />
the movie pushes us too far when it asks us to believe that Dr. Fowler's best<br />
friend, a solidly sane citizen, would also have participated in the crime. Here<br />
we have entered Shirley Jackson territory: the small town as killing machine.<br />
Perhaps only a nation in the throes of its own ongoing revenge tragedy could be<br />
expected to swallow this as a plot resolution.</p>
<p>
<span class="dropcap">I</span> understand all the fuss about <i>Gosford Park</i> (you have only to<br />
read the cast list to do that), but I certainly don't agree with it. This is<br />
low-level Robert Altman, Altman on vacation, and not a terribly fun vacation at<br />
that. </p>
<p>
I get the joke on the classic upstairs-downstairs plot; in this version,<br />
all the downstairs people are recognizable individuals, whereas we have trouble<br />
telling the upstairs twits apart. And I get the joke on the classic country-house<br />
murder mystery, complete with stupid police inspector--though Peter Sellers was<br />
always far funnier than Stephen Fry is here. The problem is, I can't see much<br />
difference between the movies being satirized and the movie that is satirizing<br />
them.</p>
<p>
Perhaps there are a few people left in the world who do not recognize the<br />
long-lost-orphan plot when it first rears its hoary head, and who are not<br />
excessively familiar with the concept of a body that has been murdered twice--and<br />
if so, they must be the people who are yukking it up in the audience. To them I<br />
say: You are not watching enough trash if you can mistake this for a high-class<br />
movie. </p>
<p>
As for the rest of you, you may want to go to <i>Gosford Park</i> for Maggie Smith's<br />
inimitably comic line readings, Emily Watson's genuinely appealing portrayal of a<br />
maid, and a lot of interesting esoterica on the mechanisms of service in a great<br />
house circa 1932. But don't go expecting <i>Nashville</i> or <i>Short Cuts.</i> That Altman is<br />
still away on vacation.</p>
<p> </p></div></div></div>Wed, 23 Jan 2002 21:54:37 +0000142434 at http://prospect.orgWendy LesserTradecrafthttp://prospect.org/article/tradecraft
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he quality of most American movies released lately has<br />
been so low that <i>Spy Game</i> stands out as a significant pleasure. This<br />
Robert Redford-Brad Pitt vehicle is not a film for the ages--I may well have<br />
forgotten all about it by next year--but it does its self-assigned job very<br />
well. It is an example of good craftsmanship that is also about good<br />
craftsmanship, and that confluence of medium and message affords its own special<br />
kind of satisfaction.</p>
<p>
The craft that<i> Spy Game </i>takes as its subject is spying, and at the<br />
heart of the film are the sections devoted to the details of "tradecraft" (to<br />
borrow John Le Carré's term). If you do not find such details<br />
scintillating, you will probably be bored or mildly confused by the movie. But if<br />
you care about the precise methods of deception and coordination and evasion and<br />
rescue practiced by a century of fictional spies, from John Buchan's to Eric<br />
Ambler's to Le Carré's, you will feast on the training and action<br />
sequences director Tony Scott offers here.</p>
<p>
The opening scene alone is gripping enough to challenge the much-touted credit<br />
sequence of the latest James Bond film. True, we don't get people leaping from<br />
airplanes into speedboats or bashing up well-known monuments in the pretitle<br />
section of<i> Spy Game; </i>what we do get, though, is a carefully timed, nearly<br />
wordless, elegantly planned prison rescue scene that is alive and alert with its<br />
own tension. The scene shows us everything and tells us nothing--it presumes,<br />
that is, that we too are alive and alert--and though we can figure out that<br />
somebody is being rescued from a Chinese prison, we don't know who or why until<br />
more than halfway through the movie. By allocating a tightly counted seven<br />
minutes for the entire rescue, this opening also sets us up for the ticking-clock<br />
feeling that will dominate the rest of the movie.</p>
<p>
And here, of course, is one of the key points where movie craft and tradecraft<br />
intersect: They are both measured against the clock, down to the second.<i> Spy<br />
Game </i>gives us 24 hours in the life of a retiring CIA operative, played with<br />
consummate casualness by Robert Redford. During this, his last day at work, he<br />
needs to save the life of a fellow agent who has gone AWOL and been captured by<br />
the Chinese. The endangered operative is a young man he trained and cared about<br />
and in some ways betrayed, a younger version of himself--in short, Brad Pitt.</p>
<p>
Redford is repeatedly obstructed in this rescue attempt by the higher-ups in<br />
his own office, particularly the marvelously slimy Stephen Dillane (who<br />
unfortunately retains a tinge of his own British accent but is otherwise perfect<br />
for the part) and the scarily sleepy-eyed Larry Bryggman. The CIA, it appears, is<br />
willing to sacrifice Brad Pitt to the Chinese in order to save itself some<br />
embarrassment. So Redford has to hide his actions from his superiors, working<br />
around the Company's tight internal security and relying heavily on his loyal<br />
secretary, a handful of far-flung buddies, and his own vast store of tradecraft.<br />
These scenes of Redford's administrative derring-do (he does the whole job from<br />
within the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia--there is manifestly not enough<br />
time for him to fly to China) are periodically punctuated by the current hour<br />
digitally emblazoned on the screen, reminding us that at 8:00 a.m., 24 hours<br />
after the movie's start, Brad Pitt will be executed for espionage.</p>
<p>
The setup is remarkably similar to the premise behind<i> 24, </i>Fox's new<br />
television show, and indeed the two share a certain kind of tension (and<i><br />
at</i>-tention). Still, the differences between them are just as instructive. The<br />
TV show, unlike the movie, can pretty much occupy real time--and much of the<br />
pleasure we derive from<i> 24 </i>is the canny way in which the creators<br />
manipulate the minutes and seconds of their 24 hour-long episodes to tell us<br />
their tale. The program is certainly a well-made object, and its brilliant<br />
editing--in particular, its use of split screens--is nothing short of<br />
revolutionary for television. But the split screens are themselves the sign of a<br />
certain distance (if you wanted to be Brechtian about it, you might even say<br />
"alienation effect") that only television can get away with. In movies, we need<br />
to see the people whole, to feel them as somehow continuous with our<br />
non-split-screen reality. Luckily,<i> 24 </i>doesn't aspire to this level of<br />
psychological realism, because if it did, it would be a failure: Its characters<br />
just aren't people we care much about. This is partly a matter of weak dialogue,<br />
but it is also a casting problem. The actors on <i>24</i> are mostly unknown,<br />
with good reason, and even Kiefer Sutherland, who has a name, doesn't live up to<br />
it. You can't watch this show without wishing that Donald had been young enough<br />
to play the role.</p>
<p>
That wish is precisely the one answered by<i> Spy Game, </i>where we get not<br />
only the father but also the idealized son--that is, Robert Redford<i> and<br /></i>Brad Pitt. Even people who have only seen the print ads for the movie have<br />
remarked on how much the two actors resemble each other. And it's true that they<br />
have certain features in common. But if they are such duplicates, why is it we've<br />
never noticed this resemblance before? I think, in fact, that they are not really<br />
so much alike; it is<i> Spy Game </i>itself that works to make them seem like<br />
father and son, or even like alter egos. I found myself repeatedly mistaking one<br />
for the other in the half-light of certain flashback scenes: that lanky frame,<br />
that angular jaw, could have been either Redford's or Pitt's. And this confusion<br />
serves the movie well, not only by emphasizing its themes of deception and<br />
disguise, but also because it cements the parallel between the spy game and the<br />
film game. In both, some kind of mantle is being handed down.</p>
<p>
For Redford, the task set by the movie was nothing more than to act Redford;<br />
we could do the rest, bringing to bear on this performance everything he's done<br />
in a similar vein, from<i> Three Days of the Condor </i>(which truly<i> was </i>a<br />
thriller for the ages) to<i> Sneakers. </i>But for Brad Pitt, the job was<br />
slightly harder. He needed to present himself as an avatar of Redford (which he<br />
did, drawing on everything from intonation to gesture) and simultaneously make a<br />
case for his own uniqueness. He had to be Redford's offspring, Redford's younger<br />
self, and also something new. At this he has succeeded splendidly.</p>
<p>
We have no other actors in American film who are quite like Brad Pitt. He<br />
calls to mind certain qualities from an earlier generation (the sweetness of<br />
Henry Fonda, the innocence of Jimmy Stewart, the charm of Joseph Cotten),<br />
qualities that we think of as singularly American; and yet he combines them with<br />
something edgy, difficult, unpredictable--something hard and sharp that is also,<br />
I guess, part of our national character. In a film of Graham Greene's<i> Quiet<br />
American, </i>he would make a great Pyle, someone who, by virtue of his own<br />
hardened innocence, brings destruction to those around him. He played a version<br />
of this role in <i>Seven,</i> and mild echoes of that performance are discernible<br />
in<i> Spy Game. </i>So are suppressed aspects of his crazy-man parts in<i> 12<br />
Monkeys </i>and<i> Fight Club </i>(each of which stressed a very different form<br />
of craziness).</p>
<p>
What's here, above all, is the special chemistry he brings to his scenes with<br />
other male actors, particularly actors older than he is. (Again, think of<i><br />
Seven </i>and the relationship with Morgan Freeman.) The camera loves Pitt, as it<br />
has always loved Redford; but that alone would not be enough to make us fond of<br />
them. For us to care about them as much as we do in<i> Spy Game</i>--for the risk<br />
and the threat to seem real enough--we need to believe that they care about each<br />
other. Redford has always been a rather cold actor (it was his coldness, his<br />
isolation, that made<i> Three Days of the Condor </i>so moving), but Brad Pitt<br />
allows him to seem warm. Pitt has a rare kind of actorly generosity: the gift of<br />
making the other man on screen seem loving and wise. He lets us feel that youth<br />
and beauty are not the only virtues worth having, that the past had strengths the<br />
present lacks. And yet in doing so, he makes us appreciate<i> his </i>present<br />
virtues even more.</p>
<p>
<i>Spy Game, </i>too, looks backward toward an earlier period and regrets the<br />
meager present (as Redford suggests in his final wry comment to Bryggman about<br />
"the old days" at the CIA). It is the kind of movie we made very well, once upon<br />
a time. Perhaps we will again, someday. In the meantime, there is always good<br />
craftsmanship.</p>
<p> </p></div></div></div>Mon, 31 Dec 2001 20:24:57 +0000142304 at http://prospect.orgWendy LesserThe Shallowshttp://prospect.org/article/shallows
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p></p><p><i>The Deep End</i> is nowhere near as good as all the other critics said it was. It is not a bad movie, as late-summer offerings go, but it is a highly implausible one. And though implausibility is not enough to ruin a movie, not even a thriller (<i>Vertigo, </i> which is practically all implausibility, triumphs precisely for that reason), you know that something is wrong when you find yourself picking apart the unlikelihoods. As I watched Tilda Swinton haul the dead man's body into the family motorboat and then dump it on the shallow edge of Lake Tahoe--a glacial lake so deep that anything sunk in its center would never be recovered--I wondered how she could possibly have missed the useful instruction contained in the title of her own movie.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I can see what David Siegel and Scott McGehee--who co-directed and co-wrote the film--were trying to do with <i>The Deep End; </i> why they cast Swinton in the mother's role, why they chose to make the child at risk a homosexual son, and why they selected the gloomily beautiful Lake Tahoe as the movie's locale. They wanted us to be frightened for her, with her; they wanted us to admire her strength and yet sympathize with her distress; they wanted to create, between us and this woman, the same bond of anxious identification that prevailed between her and her teenage son. Siegel and McGehee wanted to make a dark, threatening movie that we would feel from the inside, almost as if it were happening to us. But that's exactly the kind of movie that needs to be well defended against its own implausibilities. For us to allow ourselves to be scared by a movie, we must see what the payoff would be. We must want to take the roller-coaster ride, believing that the filmmakers are going to let us down gently at the other end--or, at the very least, that they have given us a safe vehicle.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>With <i>The Deep End, </i> there is no payoff in sight, and our vehicle--the central character--is a very flimsy one. Throughout the movie, Swinton looks like a drowned rat and behaves like a chicken with her head cut off. "Don't forget his car keys!" I hissed at her as she prepared to dump the dead man's body overboard. (We had already seen his bright red sports car, through her eyes, as she walked down to the lake before discovering the body; it's not the sort of detail you'd overlook in that sparsely populated area.) But she didn't listen to me and so had to dive for the keys, gaspingly searching the pockets of the submerged, staring corpse. How could I be expected to identify with a heroine who wouldn't cooperate with me on even the most basic level? How could I understand as reasonable a mother who, consciously or not, would rather have her son accused of murder than have his homosexuality come out in public? And why did her bond with him need to be such a masochistic one?<br /></p><p><br /></p><p><span class="dropcap">P</span>art of the problem with <i>The Deep End</i> is that a much better movie, Max Ophuls's <i>Reckless Moment, </i> was made from the same novelistic material in 1949. I haven't seen <i>The Reckless Moment</i> for 12 years--not since James Harvey showed it as part of a film course he was teaching at the University of California at Berkeley in 1989. But as I watched its unsatisfyingly bland twin, I remembered it well enough to recall that I had loved it. It featured James Mason as the blackmailer--a role taken in <i>The Deep End</i> by the dramatically handsome but relatively ineffectual Goran Visnjic--and instead of a gay son there was a rebellious daughter. The whole thing, I seemed to recall, had a much lighter feel than <i>The Deep End</i> and at the same time a much greater effect on me. I tried to rent it, but to no avail: <i>The Reckless Moment</i> is not readily available on video.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Luckily for me, James Harvey recently finished the book he had been working on for more than a decade, and in the absence of the movie itself, I could read about it in the bound galleys of <i>Movie Love in the Fifties</i> (coming out this month from Knopf). There are a few film writers who can evoke movies well enough to make you feel that you are watching them again, and Harvey is one of them. "What I set out to do here is to make you see them better," he says in the preface to <i>Movie Love in the Fifties; </i> and if you've read his <i>Romantic Comedy, </i> you will know exactly how he does it. Scene by scene and line by line, he takes us through the most important moments of a film "as it moves and changes and makes its points in front of us, as we experience it, not so much as we think and talk about it later." Whether he's escorting us through Nicholas Ray's <i>Bitter Victory, </i> Douglas Sirk's <i>Imitation of Life, </i> Orson Welles's <i>Magnificent Ambersons, </i> or any one of a dozen other great films from the period, he lends us an astuteness of analysis and a power of observation that we couldn't have had on our own.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>About <i>The Reckless Moment, </i> he says that<br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><blockquote>
<p>this modest and not-very-thrilling thriller is one of the most moving and powerful films ever made about the American family. . . . James Mason is a blackmailer who falls in love with his victim, Joan Bennett, an upper-middle-class suburban housewife. It all starts when Bennett's spoiled teenage daughter, in a quarrel with her middle-aged boyfriend, . . . accidentally kills him, pushing him off the landing of the family boathouse, leaving the body impaled on an anchor in the sands below.<br /></p><p></p></blockquote>
<p></p><p><br /></p><p> Suddenly the whole movie came back to me--not only the fact that the Swinton role had been played by the uncrushably energetic Joan Bennett, but also that it was James Mason who first began to fall in love. (In <i>The Deep End, </i> the pathetic housewife is initially attracted to the dashing blackmailer, rather than vice versa.) Harvey also reminded me how funny much of <i>The Reckless Moment</i> is. When Mason keeps threatening her with his evil accomplice, Nagle, Bennett intelligently questions the existence of this person. "You're on your own, you might as well admit it," she challenges him. To which Mason responds: "We're all involved with each other. You have your family, I have my Nagle." Harvey not only quotes this exchange to excellent effect; he also points out how closely Max Ophuls's rhythms, in this scene and elsewhere, mimic those in the comedies directed by his friend Preston Sturges.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>But if <i>The Reckless Moment</i> is more humorous than <i>The Deep End</i> (well, nothing could be less humorous), it is also more profoundly despairing about the lives it holds up for our examination. Swinton is not alone with her unhappiness at the end; she has her son to console her (creepy as that relationship may be). And if we identify with her motherliness, as the movie wants us to do, we accept as necessary the distress and anxiety that go with the maternal role. But in the Ophuls version, Bennett has acted all along without her daughter's knowledge, though on her daughter's behalf (and a daughter, in any case, would not have provided the same familial/sexual ballast that Jonathan Tucker, as Swinton's son, provides). After Bennett loses Mason in the end--under circumstances quite similar to the self-sacrificing death of <i>The Deep End'</i>s Visnjic--Bennett is alone in her room, crying. The phone rings downstairs, and it is her husband Tom calling long-distance. Harvey describes the scene eloquently:<br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><blockquote>
<p>Once again it is time not-to-worry Tom. She takes the phone . . . and begins to speak, her voice breaking but in control: "Tom--we mailed your Christmas packages. . . . Everything is fine, except we miss you terribly. . . . Yes, Tom," gradually declining as she speaks until she's sitting down, Ophuls's camera descending with her, until you're looking at her finally through the thick banisters of the stairway, as she sinks under the weight of these comforting words to Tom, and the music and the end title rise together.<br /></p><p>This final image of her--behind bars, as it were--makes a nice black-comic fadeout. . . . It's as if the filmmaker, with this witty summarizing image, were suddenly "speaking" directly to you, here at the end; as if you were suddenly, if momentarily, alone with him, the way you can be with a poet or novelist or painter.<br /></p><p></p></blockquote>
<p></p><p><br /></p><p>But that, as Harvey repeatedly shows us, is what movies were like in those days--not all movies, certainly, but the few great ones. It is not fair, I realize, to beat <i>The Deep End</i> with the stick of <i>The Reckless Moment; </i> we can't expect every thriller to be a masterpiece. It is salutary, though, to be reminded that distance, humor, and a wry sense of the ludicrous were once essential elements of even our melodramas. Perhaps today's serious young filmmakers (like today's serious young painters, poets, and novelists) are trying too earnestly to plumb the depths, when what they really need is a bit of the playful glimmer that can be found only on the reflective surface.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 09 Nov 2001 21:26:34 +0000139578 at http://prospect.orgWendy LesserWho Needs Enemies?http://prospect.org/article/who-needs-enemies
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> </div></div></div>Mon, 05 Nov 2001 22:59:25 +0000142099 at http://prospect.orgWendy LesserIn Dreams Begin Responsibilitieshttp://prospect.org/article/dreams-begin-responsibilities
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Many people will love <i>Mulholland Drive</i>, I am sure; and the fact that my admiration is mingled with profound annoyance perhaps says more about me than about the movie. It is David Lynch's best film since <i>The Elephant Man</i> (which remains, for me, the pinnacle of his achievement). It is better than the goofy <i>Eraserhead</i> and the creepy Blue Velvet, and far, far better than Lynch's terminally confused TV show <i>Twin Peaks. </i> It is so good that it raises unbelievably high expectations, which it then dashes to the ground in a display of bravura narcissism. "What? <i>Me</i> fulfill expectations? Who do you think I am?" it seems to say. Such behavior may be acceptable in a Quentin Tarantino or a Curtis Hanson or a Joel Coen, but in David Lynch, who is more talented than most of his peers combined, it is disappointing.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>The movie is nearly two and a half hours long, and it is often deliberately slow, in the manner we have come to expect from Lynch (the unzipping of a purse, for instance, may take an agonizing five seconds--complete with an overly loud zipping noise set against suspenseful silence). But it is never dull. From the smashing credit sequence, which consists of jitterbugging dancers shadowed by cloudy white faces, to the final moments of the film, when a fatal shot is fired, you will find yourself gripped by the unfolding narrative. The problem is, it unfolds more like a vast, unwieldy tarp--the sort of ragged plastic sheet you keep in your basement and never get all the kinks or crinkles out of--than it does like a neat map or a carefully drawn puzzle. David Lynch has a fine disregard for plot: He thinks of it as a mere springboard for emotionally rich images. This is all very well if you are making <i>Last Year at Marienbad</i> or some other piece of modernist tripe; but if you are aspiring to the level of the great films noirs, as Lynch's movie explicitly does, then the approach has serious shortcomings.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>For most of its length, <i>Mulholland Drive</i> seems to be a fascinating mystery centered on two women, Betty and Rita. Betty, played by the astonishingly versatile Naomi Watts, is an aspiring actress fresh from Ontario, Canada; she has come to Los Angeles to live in her aunt's temporarily vacant Hollywood apartment and break into the movies. But when she reaches the apartment, it is already occupied by a beautiful woman (played by the sultry Laura Elena Harring) who calls herself Rita, after Rita Hayworth; she can't remember her real name because she's just been in a terrible car accident that rendered her completely amnesiac. We saw the accident, and we saw Rita nearly get killed by men with guns just before that, but we have no idea why this is happening to her. In her purse she finds a wad of cash and a strange blue key that doesn't seem to unlock anything obvious; gradually, she recalls a few things, like the name Diane Selwyn and the street Mulholland Drive. Piecing these elements together, Betty and Rita jointly try to solve the mystery (which also includes demonically powerful gangsters, a smart-ass movie director, an untalented starlet named Camilla Rose, an odd young man who sees visions of death, a cowboy who makes poetically worded threats, a Spanish-flavored nightclub featuring lip-synch acts and weird magicians, and a host of other clues too numerous and bizarre to list). In the course of their quest, the two women fall in love, and the scene in which they initially go to bed with each other is one of the most delicate, remarkable love scenes I've ever encountered in a film.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Betty is too cheerful and naive to be believed, but we accept the premise because it is, after all, a David Lynch movie, so we expect reality to be slightly distorted. Ditto for the fact that Rita seems to have a new outfit for every scene (though she arrived at her aunt's apartment with only the dress she had on) and that Betty seems to know her way around Los Angeles awfully well for a newcomer ("Take us around the back," she says to a cabbie about a watched apartment complex--but you have to be pretty familiar with Los Angeles to know that just about every apartment building has a back, for car access). You may catch these discrepancies as they fly by, but you write them off to the general Lynchness.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>As it turns out, however, there is a more mundane explanation: It was all a dream. Or rather, it was something taking place in the mind of Betty (who is really named Diane Selwyn) during the minutes, or hours, or weeks, or months between the death of her lover, Rita (who is really named Camilla Rose), and her own death. Diane/Betty, we learn, has hired a killer to murder the betraying Camilla/Rita, who ran off with the smart-ass director; and the success of the execution has made Diane so miserable, guilty, or crazed that she ends up killing herself. But this explanation comes so suddenly and perfunctorily into the movie--taking up only the last 15 minutes or so and leaving most of the "clues" completely unaddressed--that I would not expect most viewers to grasp it. When I saw the film, many audience members sat dumbly staring at the long list of final credits, as if waiting for the real solution to appear in writing on the screen. And even if you <i>can</i> piece together this "real" story, it is a terrible disappointment--not only because it fails to tie up most of the rich plot strands lovingly drawn out during the rest of the movie, but also because it is so much more pat and boring than the powerfully attractive fantasy story.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>It is possible for a great movie to give us a fantasy and then take it away from us, as Hitchcock notoriously does in <i>Vertigo</i> or as <i>The Wizard of Oz </i>does in a different way. But if this technique is to work, we must get something in exchange for giving up the fantasy; we must have something to carry away with us that is at least as valuable, so that we don't feel cheated by the exchange. David Lynch has yet to learn this. The feeling of loss at the end of <i>Mulholland Drive</i> is not the same as the loss we feel at the end of <i>Vertigo. </i> The latter is a rich emotional experience that matches the movie that preceded it, while the former is the result of our very reasonable sense of having been unfairly deprived. Lynch clearly knows how to proffer extravagant gifts in great profusion. What he still needs to master is how to take them back.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 05 Nov 2001 21:19:23 +0000142290 at http://prospect.orgWendy LesserRobots and Actorshttp://prospect.org/article/robots-and-actors
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">S</span>teven Spielberg's <i>A.I.</i> is neither the worst<br />
nor the best movie he has ever made, but it is certainly the strangest. Our<br />
initial tendency is to attribute this to the involvement of Stanley Kubrick, who<br />
collaborated with Spielberg on the project for many years (though when he was<br />
given complete control after Kubrick's death, Spielberg rewrote the entire script<br />
and directed it on his own). But I think the strangeness comes from somewhere<br />
else: specifically, from deep inside Steven Spielberg. <i>A.I.</i> is a much more<br />
disturbing movie than anything this silly has a right to be, and I think that's<br />
because Spielberg has used it--unwittingly, I suspect--to reveal the darkest<br />
corners of his own unconscious. The unconscious is a notoriously disorganized<br />
place, and its unacknowledged influence may explain why the movie finally comes<br />
across as such a mess.</p>
<p>
The plot, as perhaps everybody knows by now, involves a little boy who<br />
is really a robot. The Pinocchio overtones are made explicit in the movie, and<br />
implicit in them is a kind of veiled competition between the upstart Dreamworks<br />
and the aging old Disney studio (which, in case you've forgotten, made the<br />
memorable animated feature about the little wooden puppet who wanted to be a<br />
"real boy"). Other old movies are also invoked, particularly <i>The Wizard of<br />
Oz,</i> though this time the wizard is played by a creature called Dr. Know, who<br />
looks like a cross between Albert Einstein and Steven Spielberg. I detected<br />
allusions to earlier Spielberg movies as well--<i>E.T.,</i> of course, but also <i>The<br />
Color Purple,</i> <i>Amistad,</i> and, most weirdly, <i>Schindler's List</i>. For the<br />
robots in this movie are a persecuted minority--a helpless, gentle, respectable<br />
group who are viewed as an inferior species by the humans and are publicly<br />
destroyed for the human mob's pleasure. The horrific scene in which this<br />
destruction is shown draws on exactly the same kind of brutality Spielberg lodged<br />
in the Ralph Fiennes character in <i>Schindler.</i> </p>
<p>
What, exactly, are we to make of this analogy? That the Jews were, like<br /><i>A.I.</i>'s robots, a subspecies created by the Germans for their own practical<br />
purposes? Or conversely, that anything that looks and acts human must <i>be</i><br />
human, so we put ourselves in moral jeopardy if we fail to perceive its innate<br />
rights? But movie characters played by live actors look and act human; we may<br />
even be fooled into having real emotions about them. (A lot is made in <i>A.I.</i><br />
about the capacity to feel love, and the theme is handled with all the rigor and<br />
subtlety we have come to expect from Hollywood.) Does this mean we have to<br />
believe that these blatantly fictional figures are human? Do we really rank<br />
manufactured objects alongside verifiable <i>Homo sapiens,</i> with the same rights<br />
and duties owed to both? </p>
<p>
Sarcasm is the natural response to a movie like this--and yet <i>A.I.</i> gets to<br />
you at a level that makes sarcasm seem churlish and defensive. We long for little<br />
David (played by Haley Joel Osment with his usual otherworldly precocity) to<br />
become a real boy and to win the unambivalent devotion of his mother. But even as<br />
we capitulate to the longing, we remain fully aware of the movie's creepiness.<br />
The mother (Frances O'Connor, in a thankless role) is so strangely intense a love<br />
object in this movie that it's almost surprising that <i>A.I. </i>didn't receive an<br />
NC-17 rating. At the movie's conclusion, David (resuscitated by kindly visiting<br />
aliens 2,000 years after the end of humanity--and no, you don't want to hear the<br />
details) gets his wish in the form of a single day spent with his mother, during<br />
which he and he alone fulfills her every need. He wakes her up with a kiss and<br />
puts her to bed at night, and actually comments on how glad he is that her<br />
husband and her flesh-and-blood son are both long gone. This is the kind of thing<br />
that real boys say when they are about two or three years old; but to see the<br />
fantasy enacted in full Spielbergian regalia--to see it treated as a reasonable<br />
wish--is almost unbelievably bizarre. </p>
<p>
The only unmitigatedly good thing about <i>A.I.</i> is the performance turned in<br />
by Jude Law. Despite the fact that he too is playing a mechanical object (a sex<br />
robot called Gigolo Joe), he is the most vital thing about the movie. He must<br />
have ad-libbed some of his lines, because they have a witty sparkle utterly<br />
lacking in the rest of the script; as for the way he moves, it has a grace and<br />
sprightliness rarely seen on screen since Ray Bolger played the Scarecrow. It is<br />
not just that Jude Law is more beautiful than anyone else who ever appears with<br />
him (though he is that, to be sure); it's that he seems so much more <i>alive</i><br />
than anyone else. Remember his marvelous scene as Dickie Greenleaf in <i>The<br />
Talented Mr. Ripley,</i> when he was singing and banjo-strumming in a French<br />
nightclub alongside Matt Damon's lumpish Tom Ripley? Picture that, and you'll get<br />
some idea of how he looks next to all the robotic performances in <i>A.I</i>.</p>
<p></p><p>
<span class="dropcap">A</span>ctor performances are the main reason to go see the new Frank Oz<br />
movie, <i>The Score</i>. It's a skillfully executed but basically hackneyed heist story<br />
involving a priceless object stored in the Montreal Customs House that needs to<br />
be liberated by a gang of technologically expert thieves. This would have no<br />
interest whatsoever if the gang did not include Edward Norton, Robert De Niro,<br />
and Marlon Brando.</p>
<p>
Like everyone else, I am tired of watching Brando phone in ridiculous<br />
performances. This one is something else. He first appears in a white suit and<br />
fedora, looking like a cross between Sydney Greenstreet and Truman Capote, and he<br />
camps it up from then on. Yet his scenes with De Niro (which are practically all<br />
the scenes he has) have a gentleness, a wry humor, a sense of the real pleasure<br />
of acting, that I haven't seen from him in a long time. Brando reportedly banned<br />
Frank Oz from the set on the days he was being filmed, so the director had to use<br />
De Niro as his surrogate, and you can feel this: There is an intimacy, a<br />
back-and-forth awareness between the two great actors that is impossible to fake.<br />
There are also moments when Brando is clearly improvising (De Niro first looks<br />
surprised, then cautiously amused) and this interaction also is a joy to watch.<br />
These guys are having fun with their roles, and they bring us into the fun with<br />
them.</p>
<p>
The highest praise I can give to Edward Norton is to say that he holds his own<br />
in this company. He does so with more tricks than the older actors use (his part<br />
includes a subrole as a quivering, pathetic, feebleminded character), but he uses<br />
them in a manner that finally works. And he allows himself to be the butt of the<br />
movie, so that we can enjoy the sight of the other two triumphing over him. It's<br />
a generous performance and a very entertaining one. </p>
<p>
A friend of mine describes movies like <i>The Score</i> as being "like good<br />
television," which he means disparagingly. But in this season of reruns, trashy<br />
reality shows, and smirking HBO series, good TV is hard to find at home. We<br />
should be grateful when it's offered to us in the theaters. </p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 06 Aug 2001 20:41:04 +0000142169 at http://prospect.orgWendy LesserPlay It Againhttp://prospect.org/article/play-it-again
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> </div></div></div>Fri, 20 Jul 2001 17:04:11 +0000142063 at http://prospect.orgWendy Lesser